If you've been worrying for the past several months that your cat — your delightfully mischievous, scratch-your-eyelashes-to-wake-you-up-for-food cat — was secretly implanting a mind-warping parasite in your brain with its poop, you can now breathe a sigh of relief because almighty SCIENCE has more or less disproved that controversial supposition. Last year, a group of scientists found that nations with higher rates of humans being infected with Toxoplasma gondii — a single-cell parasite that builds nice ranch-style homes in cat feces — also had higher rates of brain cancer. The link, however, was considered pretty tenuous.

Now, according to Science magazine, another group of scientists has sorted out this whole cats-cause-brain-cancer business. The scientists studied a group of almost 600,000 women aged 50 and older, tracking the how many developed brain tumors over the course of three years. Eighteen percent of these women owned at least one cat, but the cat-ladies were no more likely to develop brain cancer than their catless counterparts, despite their constant exposure to T. gondii. The moral of the story, of course, is that you can own all the cats you want. Really, just go crazy and start pulling them off the street because, now that science has reassured the tremulous public that cats are harmless (unless they're picked up improperly or something), cats are going to be in demand and nobody wants to get stuck with the mangy, one-eyed cats that are left over after the cat-adopting craze.